A connected app lets people use your service—with their own account and context—directly inside the Gemini app, Search, and other Google products. Users link your app once; after that, they can access their data and take actions in your service seamlessly from Google products.
What users want from Connected Apps
People already manage a lot of their lives on Google, and Connected Apps bring them your service right where and when they need it.
The best Connected Apps deliver at least one, but ideally all three, of these key foundations:
- Live, relevant data. Real inventory, prices, availability, and schedules from your service—shaped by what the user tells Google: dates, location, budget, and party size.
- Their personal context, from your service. Answers that reflect their history, preferences, saved items, and status in your app, combined with what they're trying to get done on Google. "Find a 30-minute spin class I can finish before 9 AM." "Reorder last week's groceries, delivered before my flight on Friday."
- Taking action. Getting the job done—booking, ordering, saving, drafting—without switching apps or losing context. "Find a show, hold the seats, add it to the calendar."
What makes a high-quality connected app
A high-quality connected app fulfills at least one of two pillars:
- Gets better when the user signs in. The experience is personalized by the user's account, or improves when they share details from their prompt. Account linking (OAuth 2.1) should be live or on your very near-term roadmap.
- Empowers users to get live context and complete actions. Create, edit, save, book, order, or update—actions that go beyond what they can do today inside Google products.
What a connected app is not
A connected app is not:
- A replacement for your data feed with Google. If you have an existing data feed with Google, that remains the best way to power broad, multi-source discovery. Moving the same read-only data to a live tool call is a transport change, not a connected app.
- A way to get a more prominent UI for general information. How results render follows user intent and the value you add—not the integration type. Interactive, branded UI is for interactive and transactional moments, or when the user asks for your app by name.
- Generic, signed-out information. Any kind of information that doesn't need an account and doesn't change the answer the user could currently find by asking Gemini or Search.